A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

On Oblivion Leveling

NOTE: This post is a game design interlude not directly connected to my
written Let’s Play of Oblivion. If you don’t care about this sort of thing, you
can skip it. But if you like painfully detailed discussions of in-game
mechanics, gosh golly gee are you in for a treat.

So before we continue the
adventures of Shush’Ogar, there’s something I need to address. In the first
episode of this series, as well as future episodes, I’m trying to mix in
discussions of game design along with humorous play-by-plays. This is all well
and good for most things, as Oblivion has a lot of weird and
amusing quirks to it. However, there is one subject in Oblivion that is too
massive an issue. There’s one giant, messy problem with the game that I want to
dedicate an entire post to properly
discuss. This one thing, this near fatal flaw is my biggest issue with
Oblivion. It bolsters many of the lesser problems in the game and is the number
one reason I can't consider Oblivion the best Elder Scrolls game. So
what could this flaw possibly be?

Today, we’re going to
talk about leveling up in Oblivion.

How You Get More
Better

In most games, ever since
the early days of Dungeons and Dragons, leveling up tends to work in a certain
way. When you kill an enemy they’ll have a certain amount of experience points,
quantifying how much your character improved due to the encounter. Earning set
amounts of experience will enable your character to level up, at which point
they either choose from a list of potential upgrades or get predetermined ones.
Games have a huge amount of variations on this process, but usually the thing
they change is how you can spend your experience, not how you earn it. The
Elder Scrolls is a notable exception in this regard.

In Elder Scrolls games,
you don’t get experience by killing things or completing quests. Instead, there
are a number of skills you have access to, like Heavy Armor or Sneak or
Alchemy. You level up each skill individually simply by using it. Every time
you hit an enemy, craft an item, or perform an action the related skill is improving.
In the most recent Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, all these skills increases counted
towards your next level. When you leveled up you would choose one of three
central resources to upgrade (health, magicka or stamina). You would also get a
perk, which could be spent on bonuses in the various skill trees.

An example of Skyrim’s
skill trees from our good friend google images. Every point on the
constellations represents a unique bonus to that skill, like extra damage or unlocking
special attacks.

This is all somewhat
difficult to discuss with different audiences. People familiar with games,
especially if they’ve played games like The Elder Scrolls, will be bored by all
this superfluous explanation. Meanwhile, I imagine people who aren’t familiar
with these systems find this all confusing or overwhelming...and just as boring
as the other group. The thing is, I have to get these particulars down. I think
one of the most important parts about RPGs is what system of progression they
use, and to explain why things don’t work I need to lay the groundwork. Skyrim
was simpler (and although I won’t get into it yet, probably better off for it),
so I explained it first. Now let’s get back to the game at hand.

Oblivion doesn’t have
this same system as Skyrim. Neither have other Elder Scrolls games before it,
as they all work differently and could be better or worse for complex reasons.
We’re not going to bog down the discussion talking about them. There are two
fundamental ways in which leveling in Oblivion is different from leveling in
Skyrim: attributes and classes. Let’s address these one at a time, starting
with the first.

Attributing Blame

Attributes are like
traditional stats in most RPGs. There are eight of them: Strength,
Intelligence, Willpower, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Personality, and Luck. Each
of these attributes is governed by 3 skills. Except Luck, which isn’t governed
by anything. The attributes all do different things, some affect multiple
variables and some only one, and they all have big flowery descriptions that
fail to explain exactly how they work. Some are pretty simple to explain, but
some of them aren’t.

For example, Intelligence
effects your total Magicka, your resource for casting spells. Your maximum
Magicka is simply double your Intelligence, that’s it. Done. Your maximum
Health, on the other hand, is determined by your Endurance attribute. At level
one your Health is simply double your Endurance. But every subsequent level
your Health increases by 1/10th of your Endurance, except if you
increase your Endurance that level in which case it also adds that increase to
your initial base health. Endurance is also one of the four separate skills that funnels into your maximum Fatigue
(Stamina in Skyrim). Intelligence and Willpower don’t affect spell cost or
spell damage, but Strength and Agility do
affect the damage you do with certain weapons.

Again, I don’t mean to
bombard you with numbers and stat explanations, but it’s all to prove a point.
Fatigue is your resource for attacking, blocking, running and jumping. While
looking up all these stats to see exactly what they did, I looked at the
formula for damage and found that weapon damage is affected by your current
Fatigue. This means that if you’re attacking with low fatigue, you do less
damage. I did not know that. I have played this game for hundreds of hours, and I did not know something that significantly changed how much damage I
dealt hitting someone.

Imagine you got to the
final stage in Super Mario Bros. but were having trouble beating it. So you
look for help on the wiki, and while you’re there you find out the whole time
you could glide in mid-air by holding the select button.

Many people probably
don’t see what the big deal with all this is. Games like this use derived stats
and complicated systems all the time, and Oblivion isn’t nearly the worst case
scenario for that. This is true. However, Elder Scrolls games are
unique in the sense that they barely need stats at all. Since leveling up is
done through skills, you can more or less throw out stats entirely, which is
what Skyrim did. Some may call this dumbing things down, but I don’t buy that.

You see, there’s a
personal principle that I’ve formed over years and years of playing games,
particularly numbers-driven ones like this. I’ll need a different post someday to
make my opinions on it clear, but I can sum it up rather simply: Complexity does not equal depth. A
system being complicated has almost nothing to do with it being a good system.
In fact, complicated systems often function worse than simpler ones, because it
obfuscates how things work and makes it difficult for the player to make clear
informed decisions about the game they’re playing. And you want the player to make informed decisions, because unraveling
systems and making interesting choices is a big part of what’s fun about
interactive entertainment.

So do I think having attributes
in Oblivion made the game more deep and interesting? Not really. I feel Skyrim
made the right decision in removing them and that they don’t add much to the
game. But they wouldn’t be asbad if
it weren’t for an even worse problem. That’s right, attributes aren’t the main
problem here. In fact, they’re not even the second
worst thing about the system. I don’t feel attributes are necessary here, but
they’re a distant third in terms of problems with Oblivion leveling. Let’s move
on to the second worst thing about progression in Oblivion: classes.

This System Has No
Class

So in Oblivion, all
skills don’t go towards leveling up your character. If that’s the case, how do
you level up in Oblivion? The answer is classes. Near the start of the game you
choose from a list of classes, like warrior, mage or thief. These classes each
have 7 of 21 skills listed as their major skills. Any time you level up a major
skill, you get 1/10th of your next level. For example, here’s a
picture of what looks to be a mage’s major skills.

Menus, numbers and
progress bars! I hope you guys are pumped as hell about these, because this
crazy analysis train isn’t stopping anytime soon.

So every time you gain a
level in one of these major skills, it counts towards your next overall level.
You can also make a custom class where you choose any 7 skills you want to be
your major skills. At first this system doesn’t sound too bad. You pick certain
skills to focus on and doing so gets you general levels as well. But problems
arise when we look into what happens when you level up.

When you level up in
Oblivion, there are a few benefits to be gained. One is that your health
increases a bit every level, and another is that some quests have level
requirements. Beyond that, the advantages all come from increasing your attributes.
Every level, you choose 3 attributes to raise. The more you’ve increased skills
tied to an attribute, the more you can level it up. The max attribute boost you
can get is +5, from leveling up related skills 10 or more times. A visual aid
may help at this point.

The keen among you may
have already spotted the problem. These increases to your attributes can come
from leveling up any skill. However, leveling up your major skills means you’ll
level up sooner, thereby granting you less
bonuses to your attributes. A good example of this problem is the mage
class we saw earlier. This class has all the skills that govern Willpower and
Intelligence as major skills. This means that it is physically impossible for
them to get the maximum attribute bonus in more than one of them in a single
level. Even if they’re disciplined enough to only improve say Intelligence
skills that level, it will take all 10 of their skill increases towards their
next level to get the max attribute bonus in just that.

Basically this means one
thing. Characters that use the skills they specialize in will be objectively
worse than those who don’t. Technically, the best way to play the game is to
make a custom class with major skills you never use. One thing that makes this
even worse is that skills have a cap at 100 where you can’t raise them any
higher. That means if you don’t spend your attribute bonuses wisely you
permanently prevent them from getting past a certain point. So, by making
progress you can actively prevent your character from being the best they could
be in the long run.

For all that Oblivion is
a fun game, this is not a good system. I understand that it’s working from a
different base with the skill-based progression, but it doesn’t function properly.
It’s not as though it would be impossible to make something like this work, either.
If they really wanted attributes they could’ve simply let you choose which ones
to increase irrespective of your skills. Or perhaps there could be some bonus
to raising stats that you have major skills in. The current system isn’t
successful for anyone, and its greatest strength is the game being easy enough
that some people don’t notice the problem.

This all brings us to the
final issue. Just as classes retroactively make attributes worse, this next
problem makes everything even more of an issue. The situation with classes is
still pretty bad, don’t get me wrong. It’s a kind of broken system that doesn’t
have many advantages to it, so I wouldn’t let it off the hook entirely.
However, if it were the biggest problem in the game people could power though it
with enough leveling and it wouldn’t be near as much of an issue. That’s not
the case though, because of the worst part about Oblivion. Ladies and
gentlemen, here we are at last...

Let Me Level With You

In The Elder Scrolls 4:
Oblivion, the game levels up with you.

Allow me to explain.
Elder Scrolls games allow you the freedom to go anywhere and do things in any
order. However, if there were enemies much stronger than you all over the
world, this wouldn’t exactly be true. There wouldn’t be any literal barriers in
your way, but it wouldn’t be feasible to defeat monsters notably, statistically stronger than you. This
forms a softer kind of barrier on progression, but a barrier nonetheless.
Oblivion didn’t want that barrier. It wanted you to be able to go anywhere at
any time and find an appropriate challenge for your skills. So Oblivion scales
enemies all over the game to your level, giving them better stats and equipment
and sometimes switching them out with stronger enemies.

I can understand what the
developers were going for here. I can even sympathize with it being a tough, if
not impossible, problem to solve. For all the issues of this system, you can
start the game wandering into any direction, any dungeon, and find it balanced
to your level. But there’s no getting around it: I think this is a questionable
idea with terrible execution. As nice as it sounds letting the player go
anywhere and find balanced gameplay, you immediately get some drawbacks. For
example, you lose out on the sort of self-balancing gameplay that RPGs inherently provide.

In a situation where
enemies have set levels, you can train more or less to compensate for your
skills and optimization as a player. When every enemy is scaled to your level,
you can never do that. The game has a difficulty slider you can use to make
things more or less difficult. But not only does this feel cheap and
unsatisfying, it also drives home one of the primary problems of a system like
this: everything feels the same. Have you ever played an RPG or upgrade-centric
game and gone back to the beginning, proceeding to kick in the teeth of an
enemy that used to give you trouble? Wasn’t that awesome?

Oh hey there boss of
the starting zone, I’m that guy who failed to kill you half a dozen times. I’m
now Captain Lord Godking of Space and Time. Rematch?

Part of the fun in games
with progression is the feeling that you are actually progressing. This not only invests you in pressing forward with
your character, but it helps orient you. Having enemies both weaker and
stronger than you is crucial, because the strength of those enemies helps
define them beyond visuals. When traversing the overworld in early video game RPGs, the type and strength of foes was often the only thing that defined
an area. Sure this patch of forest looks just like the one a continent over,
but here you fight giants and those annoying poison spiders, or so forth. The
ability to look back to areas that are now trivial and feel accomplished, or
look forward to areas that are too tough for you and feel challenged or apprehensive;
these are a huge shame to lose. Video games and RPGs in particular are uniquely
capable of giving you this sense of place, of experiencing personal journeys
through an entire defined, fictional world. Scaled leveling destroys a lot of
that.

When I play Oblivion, my
experiences tend to blend together. I play the game and I enjoy myself, because
the game is fun and there are a lot
of great things about it. But after the fact, when I try to remember anything
specific that happened to me all that comes to mind are pre-defined quests.
Oblivion has some interesting quests, but for everything else in the game I
draw a blank. This isn’t helped by the games’ scenery being fairly repetitive.
The towns are different and there’s certainly some variety, but the game
uses a lot of procedural generation and repeated assets. Combined with the
often bland dungeon and level design, constantly replaying (if good) music and
other bits of repetition, the scaled leveling makes Oblivion all just
feel...the same.

You either remember
exactly which cave in the game this is, or you’re a person who is telling me
THE TRUTH.

Where other games are
richly and uniquely textured throughout, Oblivion is a massive surface of
smooth, uniform glass. Only tiny imperfections mar the surface, only tiny
anecdotes and peculiarities make for memorable moments. You’ll be ambushed by
bandits on the road at level 1 and you’ll be ambushed by the same bandits 30
levels later, only then the bandits will be far beefier and wearing a set of
magnificently enchanted fancy armor. This is half the problem caused by the
leveling system, the half that’s less talked about. Everyone can see the
mechanical problems with the leveling in Oblivion, the things that technically
just don’t work. Indeed, I’ll get back to those in a second. But I think this
feeling of progression, this texture that’s lost is important.

All Elder Scrolls games,
and open-world games in general, struggle with this problem. But I’ve never
felt a uniformity of experience as strongly as when playing Oblivion. At its
worst, it feels like a collection of stitched together pieces. Like an endless
treadmill of dull, continuous fights of the same length and difficulty in the
same environments (often the exact same room). It ceases to feel like a world,
the carefully crafted illusion falls apart and all the fancy architecture and
voice-acted scenes they can muster can’t bring me back into it. It’s at these
times I stop playing Oblivion. At times like these I feel there wasn’t much
point to doing so in the first place.

...so that’s the inherent
problem with scaled leveling, which Oblivion suffers from quite strongly. But
we aren’t quite out of the woods of negativity yet. The other parts of the
leveling system join forces with scaled leveling to break the game in one last
way.

Negative Progression

Remember back when I
discussed attributes and classes, and mentioned that you could inefficiently
level up your stats and skills? Scaled leveling builds on that issue, like an
intricate tower of human feces, a Voltron of rotting corpses, or a house built
on several separate layers of haunted Native American burial ground. In a
normal, non-scaled game you can still level up inefficiently. You can spend
hours getting better at basket-weaving or macaroni art and then do terribly
when you try to engage in fisticuffs with a dragon. But the difference is that
in other games, you can just level up more to fix the problem. You can level up
inefficiently, but doing so will never be outright negative.

But in Oblivion, if you
level up without raising the proper skills or getting enough stat points,
enemies will be getting stronger faster
than you. You’ll have more difficulty fighting them in general, and the
further you slip behind them the more permanently that disadvantage will stick.
You can reach a point where things will never be as easy as they used to be,
ever again, fighting almost anything. Health tends to outstrip damage in
Oblivion to begin with, so high-level fights are already long-winded, ponderous
encounters that drag on longer than they need to. If you level up incorrectly
this problem gets even worse, to where combat becomes a complete chore to
manage.

Some specific cases
are even more broken. Ogres regenerate health over time, so with relative ease
you can become too weak to kill them at all.

I don’t like speaking in
absolutes in general, and can’t think of many objective rules of game design.
However, I would say this comes close: Progression/rewards for success in games
should never be outright negative. I cannot express enough how much it bothers
me that this can be the case in Oblivion. If anything, a system like this
should have an even better feedback loop than traditional levels, as you get
little bits of progress (in the form of skill increases) far more frequently.
Instead, every time I get one of those increases there’s a tiny twinge in the
back of my brain that wonders: Should I have done that? Am I making things
harder for me later?

Perhaps other people
don’t think about it as much or let it bother them. I wouldn’t doubt it, and it
probably makes the game more fun. When I first played the game I didn’t even
consider how this system was flawed. But after I got to higher levels and
started noticing the issues with it, there was no going back. Now every time I
play the game there’s this looming specter of a leveling system hanging over
the proceedings. And every time I make a new character, I have to make a
choice.

The most efficient way to
play the game by far is to pick major skills that you will never ever use. Then
you’ll be level one forever but you’ll keep getting stronger until you’re
ridiculously overpowered. However, playing the game this way makes it much less
interesting. You’ll never see higher level enemies, never do quests with level
requirements, never get to advance your attributes beyond what they start with,
and never find new loot like better weapons and armor. So that’s not a great
way to play. Playing with skills you actually use works fine for a while, but
it breaks down at higher levels. Plus, players like me who enjoy building and
improving characters will be constantly bothered by the inefficiency happening
in the background.

Dang it my Restoration
skill increased and I didn’t actually want to get better at WHY IS THIS A
PROBLEM I CAN HAVE?!

What I typically do these
days is some type of hybrid system. I pick only some skills I’ll use as major
skills, or I pick ones I don’t use but deliberately level when I feel the time
is right. Then I can at least get some joy out of leveling, increasing
challenge and variety over time while still shaping a specific character build.
Of course, even then things aren’t perfect. I have to choose between spending
time playing the game normally and taking breaks to develop stats properly. No
matter what I’ll never be completely free of this scaled leveling.

On the Road to
Improvement

So that more or less
covers the problems with Oblivion’s leveling system. It’s a shame that the
issue is so all-encompassing, because I’ll again defend Oblivion as a good
game. In the interest of ending on something positive, and because I want to
analyze how this system is done differently, I’m going to finish by looking at
the more recent Skyrim. People have varying opinions on Skyrim and it’s by no
means a perfect game. However, they did do some things to help the leveling problem.
The fundamental issues with the system may never be resolved, but it can
certainly be improved to the point where those problems are negligible. Let’s
go point-by-point and see what positive changes Skyrim made.

Fixed-level Enemies – I don’t think Oblivion scales everything exactly to your level, but it
does scale an awful lot. You’ll never, for example, see an enemy that is clearly
and vastly stronger than other enemies at that level. Skyrim doesn’t have too
many drastic examples of this either, but it does have some. The first to come
to mind would be the Giants, who you can find wandering the plains at a fairly
low level. They’re incredibly strong and will likely kill you in a single
strike, but you can eventually grow powerful enough to kill them easily. Speaking
of tough enemies, Skyrim also had...

Minions and Bosses – I’ve mentioned that most fights in Oblivion
tend to feel the same, and part of the reason is lack of enemy variety. Skyrim
still does scale enemies, but it also tries to give different types of
encounters with enemies that are fairly weak and/or strong for the player’s level.
There are fights where you can just tear through dozens of puny skeletons at
once, and also fights with boss-like monsters that have better stats, abilities
and are clearly labeled differently. Speaking of those labels...

Defined Enemy Tiers – When you fight a bandit in Oblivion, it could
be at any level and appropriate strength. In Skyrim, bandits will always be
weak. However, bandit thugs will be
slightly stronger, and bandit highwaymen stronger than those and so on. Instead
of simply scaling the one enemy and giving it better stats and gear as time
goes on, Skyrim defines different types of each enemy that get stronger and
have better equipment or abilities. When they’re not humanoids with equipment,
there are often other visual differences. A regular dragon will have a
different color, tail and head than a blood dragon, and an elder dragon will
look different from both of them. Not only does it make it easier to judge the
danger of a target right away, but it helps with the problem of anchoring the
player and giving a sense of progression.

For example, here we
have the first type of dragons you see in Skyrim...

...and here is the second
tier of dragon, the blood dragon.

Another thing to note
with the defined enemy tiers is that they also have different level ranges. For
example, the strongest types of bandits are bandit chiefs. Their level is
only in the late-20s, and yet the max level in the default game is all the way
up to 81. It’s common for players to get to a high enough level that any
bandits they meet are completely trivial to fight. I think this is a great
compromise for scaling enemies while still trying to keep the context and
benefits provided with fixed levels.

Also, this section was
the perfect time to use the word “stratified”, but I couldn’t find a good place
to do so. So I’m bringing that up here.

Y’know, just thought I’d
mention.

It’s a nice word is all.
Stratified.

Please notice how smart I
am.

Regional Level Ranges – I wasn’t even consciously aware of this
one, but I found out about it while looking stuff up and it’s worth mentioning.
Apparently in Skyrim different locations have inherent difficulty levels, and certain
areas/dungeons (generally at higher elevations) are meant to be quite difficult
for low-level characters. Though I haven’t ever actively noticed this, I have
sometimes felt that dungeons were unusually difficult compared to other ones I
was doing at the time. I like this feature in theory as it again helps with the
central problems of scaled leveling. I’d just recommend that future games made
the difference starker and add more narrative/visual signposting so it’s clear
to all players that certain areas are intended to be more deadly.

Locking Areas to a Level – When you first reach a dungeon in
Skyrim, that dungeon will scale to your current level, but then stay at that
level. If you go into a dungeon at level 12, it will lock into being a level 12
dungeon. If you find things too difficult and leave, returning when you’re
level 25, that dungeon will still be scaled for a level 12 character. This
means that it’s much harder to get permanently stuck on anything, and in some
situations you can level well above enemies you fought before. Of course due to
the regional level ranges mentioned previously, some areas have minimum or
maximum levels for a dungeon. So if a level 2 character goes into a dungeon
ranged levels 15-30, it’ll be scaled to level 15. But since it’ll be locked
there the player can leave and come back when they’re ready.

Removing Attributes and Classes – This is the number one thing that
makes scaled leveling work in Skyrim better than it does in Oblivion. The
system of attributes and classes was complicated without adding depth, often
counter-intuitive, and just generally broken in a large number of ways. When
the system is simply gaining skills and perks for them it simplifies
things while making it much harder to screw yourself over. Sure it’s still
possible to make things temporarily worse for yourself by leveling non-combat
skills like Speech and then going into combat. But due to some enemies like
bandits capped at lower levels and the scale locking when you find a dungeon,
it’ll always be possible to find somewhere to safely increase those combat
skills until things are easier again. All without having to use a difficulty
slider.

So as far as I’m
concerned, Skyrim has taken a number of measures that make its level scaling
hugely improved from what existed in Oblivion. Is the system Skyrim has
perfect? Of course not. The fundamental struggles of scaled leveling are still
present, though much subdued, and it has other issues. But things are improving
from Oblivion’s fun-sucking mess of a system. And one more time I will
reiterate: Oblivion is still a fine game. But I have had few progression
systems bother me as much as this one, and I needed to get that off my chest.

So that sure was over
5,000 words complaining about a leveling system. Join me next time, when I stop
that and get back to actually playing the game. Well, I still may complain
about some things. But only sometimes. Rarely. A bit.